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Princess Weddings

Japanese company Kuraudia Co. recently partnered with Disney to create a new line of gorgeous Disney Princess wedding dresses. This is far from the only company that makes wedding gowns inspired by our favorite animated heroines. Though they recently went out of business, the popular American bridal chain, Alfred Angelo, had recently revealed several new designs for Disney Princess inspired dresses that were more modern-looking than the ones from Japan. Designer Kirstie Kelly also unveiled a Disney Princess inspired collection several years ago, which has since been discontinued. Though the Americanized versions of these dresses hardly resemble classic princess fashion, the correlation between weddings and princesses seems to date back an eternity. Do the two concepts go hand-in-hand like a bride and groom at the altar? Let's find out.

Since the very beginning, most fairy tales that end with "happily ever after" included a wedding. In fact, the direct translation of the French version of "happily ever after," "ils vécurent heureux et eurent beaucoup d'enfants," is "they lived happily and had lots of children." I guess the marriage part is a given in France. Indeed, it is not until very recently that weddings to princes became unnecessary in animated princess stories. Though the older movies did not always include the wedding, it was usually assumed that it took place later. Some Disney Princess stories saved the wedding for the sequel, in the case of Aladdin and the King of Thieves or a short in the case of "Tangled Ever After." Regardless, princess-style weddings are usually the main goal for most engaged women. In my opinion, the award for best princess wedding goes to Tiana, who got to have two very different weddings. The first one was the magical bayou wedding where her gorgeous dress appeared unexpectedly when she turned back from being a frog, and the second was a more modern-style wedding with a new dress and all of her friends and family. The animators clearly put a lot of time and effort into both of her weddings. Instead of an image of Tiana and Naveen driving away in a carriage and kissing like in Cinderella, they added all of the little details to her wedding ceremonies, like the magic of Mama Odie ordaining the two frogs at the bayou, her friends and family looking on proudly at her second wedding, and her post-married life with Naveen building their restaurant, wedding bands in tow on their fingers. I absolutely love her bayou dress. It's one of my favorite Disney Princess dresses. It looks like she's popping right out of a beautiful lily pad with a gorgeous pearl tiara. I even have a doll of her in it.

My favorite princess, Ariel, had a unique wedding because she got married on a ship so that both sides of the family could attend. King Triton rising out of the water to hug her and forming a rainbow with his trident are iconic and unforgettable details of the ending of The Little Mermaid. Ariel's wedding dress had some unique details too, like the seafoam green accents and the puffed sleeves. It also had a classic princess-style ballgown skirt, instead of the more modern mermaid cut that most Americal designers use for Ariel-inspired dresses. Her wedding dress appeared to be the main inspiration for her retired meet'n'greet dress when meeting her as a human in princess attractions at the Disney Parks. She even had an elaborate wedding cake, which unfortunately got demolished when Sebastian tried to escape from Chef Louie. When I got married, I sailed away on a cruise ship for my honeymoon but went with a more traditional ballroom for the venue. It would be rather difficult to convince all the guests to sail away on a ship in real life.

The one detail that the media tries to push on every bride for a princess-style wedding experience is the Cinderella horse-drawn carriage. Personally, I think this is an unnecessary ploy for money for two reasons. First, you would only actually be in the coach for maybe a couple of minutes, and second, it's a ridiculously expensive couple of minutes. It is absolutely possible to have a gorgeous and elegant princess wedding on a budget, and I have done it. People have asked me if I wanted to get married at one of the Disney castles, but it is absolutely not worth spending one's entire life savings in order to force their guests to get up before sunrise or in the middle of the night just to have the castle in their wedding photos while the parks are off hours. At my wedding, I had a custom-made ballgown from China and got married in a beautiful glittering ballroom surrounded by all of the people I love. That was more than enough to make me feel like a princess.

Giselle's wedding from Enchanted was an interesting situation because her enormous wedding dress was a big plot point in the movie, even though she never actually went through with the wedding. As a casual princess parody, Enchanted was meant to make fun of the trope of princesses getting married immediately upon meeting their prince. In doing so, it also demonstrated some of the hazards of princess fashion, such as how impractical it can be to have a full crinoline cage under your dress in everyday life. However, it also made it look very appealing to befriend forest animals to help out with the many intricate details of planning a wedding. Though Giselle's wedding dress is not my favorite due to being ridiculously overdone, it is iconic to her character because it demonstrates her creativity and shows just how over the top she was before entering the real world and calming down somewhat.

Some other fairy tale princess weddings of note include Odette's heavily swan-themed wedding in The Swan Princess, and Thumbelina's magical faery wedding, where she walked down a rainbow aisle and flew away on Cornelius's bumblebee. Both of these were themed perfectly to their stories' plots and characters, while also featuring members of their family in attendance. Disney seems to have started a new wedding trend in their live-action remakes for both Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast in which the brides' wedding dresses are decorated with hand-painted flowers. I suppose they did this in an attempt to make them stand out from the original animated versions, which failed they failed to do. However, they probably were able to sell more dolls and costumes with these unique designs.Being a bride is an opportunity for any woman to feel like a princess. Just ask Princess Buttercup. It's a beautiful romantic event to celebrate true love surrounded by family and friends. There are many terrific weddings in princess movies as well as princess-inspired wedding details to purchase or DIY in real life. I already had my fairy tale wedding, and I can say with utmost certainty that the most important part is not the dress or the venue, but being with the people you love. That's what makes weddings seem so magical.

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …